In an ECC contract, if the contractor notifies an early warning to the project manager, does the project manager have to reply within a certain time?
Answer
Early warnings are about risks of things happening in the future. As such they are too important to be ignored, or left to correspondence. Firstly, when you notify and early warning of anything that is of any importance, you need to be instructing the project manager to attend a risk reduction meeting – see clause 16.2. And at that meeting both of you should be sitting down and agreeing how this future risk is going to be managed – see clause 16.3.
Project managers’ responsibility is firstly whenever they receive an early warning to put it in the risk register (clause 16.1). They then have to get involved in managing the risk at the risk reduction meeting you or they have called, and finally they have to record all of that on the risk register and re-issue it to you (clause 16.4).
